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The Worst Super Bowl Ads Of All Time

“Miller Lite was beyond horrible in the 90s,” she says. “Their series of spots was so bad it’s beyond words. Basically, they made meaningless trash and sold it as ‘surrealism.’”

Outpost.com is now defunct—“but the animal cruelty thing was crazy,” she says. “They tried to create stopping power through firing gerbils at a wall through a cannon, and at the end of the day, you didn’t remember the brand, you didn’t remember what they did – and if you did, you kinda hated them for it.”

She says Chevy’s 2012 “Apocalypse” is another one of the worst Super Bowl ads of all time. “Chevy spent a lot of money to make a very basic point – but we already knew Chevy’s are reliable from their ‘Like a Rock’ campaign. It seems there should’ve been a smarter, simpler way to get there that would’ve had more impact.”

Taylor’s top picks for worst Super Bowl ads of all time include Ameriquest’s “Flight Accident” (2006) and TaxAct.com’s 2012 “Free to Pee.”

The Ameriquest ad shows a woman needing to use the bathroom on a plane and trying to politely get out from the window seat over two men she is sitting next to. As she gets up turbulence hits and she lands on top of the man in the aisle seat in a compromising position. The tagline then appears: “Don’t Judge Too Quickly.”

“While this ad is funny and was ranked highly on USA Today, consumers did not remember it as an ad for a mortgage company, as “Ameriquest” does not appear until the last frame of the ad. Some research I am working on shows that it did nothing to do the brand which makes sense given that it says nothing about the company and its product and the link between ‘Don’t Judge Too Quickly’ and the company is not clear,” Taylor explains.

O’Connell chose H&M’s David Beckham spot as a least favorite. “You’ve got one of the most celebrated, and dare I say gorgeous, athletes in the world. And you took the expected, easy way out. If you try for something great and don’t quite make it, at least you gave it a shot. But this spot didn’t even feel like it tried.”

Another fail, according to O’Connell:Bud Light Platinum’s 2012 spot. “Or was it Bronze? Or Titanium? Who knows,” he says. “It was about some metal beer. And all it featured was the bottle for 30 seconds with some high tech engraving. Who cares? It offered nothing of interest. And given the brand is clearly capable of doing such great things, it was a disappointment. Ironically, the size of the disappointment made it memorable for me.”

Con Williamson, chief creative officer of Erwin Penland says: “While I’m being asked to be critical, it’s a bit unfair to the creators of the work. I have seen great ideas go into meetings, and come out drastically changed thanks to way too many opinions taking effect. Because it’s the Super Bowl, everyone wants to make their mark on the work, and by the end what we see is the result of a giant group overthink.”

“The absolute worst failures are actually the ones we can’t remember at all,” says Ammiel Kamon, executive vice president of product and marketing at Kontera. “That is truly worst than having a bad flop that people actually talk about. In that sense, we can’t really remember and certainly can’t name brands that were failures,” he concludes.

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The worst Super Bowl ads of all time will get at least two more strong contenders this year: one from Audi (featuring a creepy mutant breed of dog) and one VW – involving German engineers that fart rainbows.

I would love to see youtube videos of the people responsible for these failures getting fired on the following Monday.

Why do I suspect that somewhere Go Daddy execs are cackling at having come out on top of this list? Surely, their forays into cringe-worthy sexism are deliberate pot-stirring and not just continuing tone deafness?